“I think our friend here could use a glass of water,” she said to Finnion. “I’ll be back in a moment.” Finnion looked puzzled, but nodded. And forcing herself not to show undue haste, Vanessa left the room.
Outside in the corridor, she walked quickly back to the room where the equipment was and activated the communications software in one of the processors. She set it to call an access number into the Neurodyne research system, and it connected after about twenty seconds. This was a system that Vanessa knew intimately. Working deftly, she identified the control computer handling the DNC coupler that Kevin was using. He was still coupled in, with the executive program running. Vanessa typed in a patch of code and sent it over the link to disenable the exit routine. It meant that the operator would be locked into the system, unable to decouple using internal commands. For good measure, Vanessa also blocked the device control supervisor, making it impossible for him to communicate with any mecs.
Then she went back to the other room, called Finnion outside, and explained what had happened. “It’s Kevin,” she said. “Something in the van downstairs is still operating. He’s linking through from the lab back at Neurodyne. But I dialed in and fixed the software to stop him coming off the machine. So we can figure out what to do with him later, after I talk to Martin. In the meantime, it doesn’t change the main business. We take care of that first. It’s almost time. Do you want to bring Phil?”
For a while, Kevin was too numbed by what he had heard to know what to do. The talk seemed to have stopped. He risked another peek from Michelle’s pocket and saw that Vanessa, the mustached man whom he now knew to be Garsten, and the thickset one they called Andy, had left. Michelle didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger. While things were quiet, he could exit quickly and warn Eric via his car phone. He called down the Control menu and flagged the exit option to decouple. Nothing happened.
He tried again. Again the system didn’t respond. Something was suddenly very wrong.
When he tried reconnecting to the mec, that was dead too. Desperately he selected alternate channels to the other mecs that they had left in Garsten’s office. Nothing. He tried activating others that were still in the van, development models in the lab around him, and models in other parts of Neurodyne. Nothing.
And that was when he panicked. His father was about to be murdered, and apart from Michelle, he was the only person who knew. But he was trapped, unable to move, with all his senses and motor functions locked into a machine. In effect, paralyzed—until somebody released him from the outside.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Corfe’s forebodings had grown progressively worse while he sat in the back of the Seattle city police cruiser outside Garsten’s office, waiting for a representative from the security company to arrive. The van that he said had been stolen was not outside; neither was the beige Cadillac or any other vehicle. There had been no answer at the door, and an officer who toured around the outside of the building had found no sign of life. By that time, Corfe’s own suspicion that he had made a mistake must have shown, and the two officers who had brought him had decided there was no evidence of an emergency sufficient to justify a forced entry. Corfe’s attempt to confess that he and the missing woman had broken in already hadn’t helped—especially when the security company reported no alarms and nothing amiss on their internal TV monitors. Well, it wasn’t actually “they” who had broken in, he’d tried to explain, but little machines.
“Machines, huh?” The officers had just barely refrained from asking openly if they’d come out of a UFO that landed on the roof.
When the opened vent that Corfe told them they’d find at the back of the house turned out not to be, with no trace of the things he said would be inside the pipe, that hadn’t helped much either. Now, from the way they had been exchanging gossip in the front seats for the last ten minutes and practically ignoring him, it was painfully clear that they had written him off as a crank and just wanted to see this business through, then go find themselves a coffee and donut shop.